Flew my plane for the first time on Saturday.

The good news: It flies very well–and very fast. Cruising speed about 65 miles per hour, not bad for a trainer.

The bad news: Using the wrong cable between my transmitter and the flight instructor’s transmitter resulted in…er, “erratic operation.” The instructor tried to bring it down and the transmitter quit working–plane came down about 50 yards short of the runway, and broke the tail section clean off.

Easy fix, and the proper cable is on the way. Maybe this weekend…

In other news, the SymToys Web site, our new Web site for Onyx and Symphony, is online…

“Atrocity is recognized as such by victim and perpetrator alike, by all who learn about it at whatever remove. Atrocity has no excuses, no mitigating argument. Atrocity never balances or rectifies the past. Atrocity merely arms the future for more atrocity. It is self-perpetuating upon itself–a barbarous form of incest. Whoever commits atrocity also commits those future atrocities thus bred.”
–Frank Herbert

I rarely remember my dreams. So it’s a matter of some surprise when I remember three separate dreams in a single night, and even more surprising when those dreams involve janezero (one of the more interesting people on LiveJournal), J. Robert oppenheimer, inventor of the hydrogen bomb; and alligators.

The first dream I remember was a pretty straightforward nightmare about being chased by alligators. You know, the usual wake-up-in-a-sweat thing; nothing really remarkable.

The second dream had me back in college again. J. Robert Oppenheimer was there; he’d decided to use the college to store a bunch of prototypes of new nuclear bombs–in a “live,” fully armed state. In the dream, I took exception to this idea, on the grounds that it’d be altogether too easy to vaporize the campus and most of the surrounding city, so I took it upon myself to sneak into the lab at night and steal vital parts of the bombs, rendering them inert. This one degenerated after that into a straightforward nightmare about being chased by Nobel Prize-winning physicists, police, and campus deans.

The third one was weird.

I was working for a bank–specifically, a bank built on the top of a cliff, which traded only in gold bullion, not currency. Since dragons love gold, this bank was subject to occasional raids by dragons, who generally came in from above the cliff. janezero worked there as well; whenever a dragon came by, she’d grab her laptop and head out the front door, concealing herself in the bushes outside. She’d keep track of the dragon, sending messages to my laptop about its position, which I’d in turn relay on to the SWAT team that was dispatched whenever a dragon came by.

Mind you, I don’t even know janezero.

I have no idea what any of this means.

“Civilized people cannot fathom, much less predict, the actions of evil people.”
-Ñ Ed Evans, MGySgt, USMC (Ret.)

I disagree strongly with that statement, and with the sentiment and misunderstanding that motivates it.

This statement is deeply, profoundly wrong, because it caters to the illusion of the average man: I am not evil. Other people are evil. Evil is something foreign; it is a mysterious, unseeable, unknowable force that informs the actions of others. Civilized people like me are not evil; in fact, evil is so unknowable, so Other, so Alien that civilized people like me can never even hope to comprehend it.

Wrong.

Evil is a part of all of us. It lives inside each and every one of us. It shapes and influences who we are as human beings. In its measure, it defines us. Civilized people certainly CAN fathom evil; indeed; civilized people can BECOME evil.

And the fact that people cling to the naive comfort of the illusion that they are not evil, they can never be evil, they can never know evil, is exactly what makes it happen.

The guards at the Nazi concentration camps were not monsters. They were not psychopaths; psychopaths make poor soldiers. They were not insane; they were not uncivilized barbarians. They were ordinary people, just like you and me. They perpetrated monstrous acts of atrocity because they were tricked into believing their actions were good. They could not recognize their own evil for what it was.

Just as we civilized Americans were tricked into evil when we created concentration camps of our own for Japanese Americans during WWII.

Evil has a thousand justifications, a thousand rationales. It isn’t my problem. I have to do it. I’m under orders. I am not the one to question. I’ll be forgiven. They are bad, not me. I am doing what is necessary. I am doing what is right.

You want to fathom evil? Don’t look at terrorists and Nazi; smell yourself. Look inside your own heart. You’ll find evil there, better believe it. And if you deny it, you make yourself a tool of those who would use the evil within you for their own ends.

The only way to defeat evil is to know that evil is a part of you. It isn’t foreign and unfathomable; it exists within you, and me, and every other person who has ever lived. If you know your own capacity for evil, understand it, know the shape and form of the darkest part of your heart, then you can never be tricked by it, you can never be surprised by it, you can recognize it for what it is.

But that’s scary. It’s terrifying to look into yourself and see the monster within you. Far more comfortable and safe to believe that evil is Out There, is some crazy Arab or some homicidal Nazi, but never, ever, ever YOU.

You want to believe evil is unfathomable? Fine. Don’t be surprised when your circumstance changes and you find yourself commiting the atrocity.

…a box of sex, or a box of meat?

Once upon a time, lordfuckbeast went out to eat, and came back with a take-home box filled with meat. A large take-home box. And indeed, his box of meat was a metaphor for decadent excess for many months.

There is, no doubt, a very carnal pleasure to be had from possessing a box of meat. The phrase even SOUNDS animalistic–“box of meat.”

Yesterday, the box of sex toys I ordered to go along with Symphony arrived. A very large box of sex toys. So large, there is something almost divine in its excess.

I like the idea of a box of sex better than the idea of a box of meat. lordfuckbeast claims this is because I don’t fully appreciate meat–which is not entirely true. I do appreaciate meat, though not in a “steak and potatoes” kind of way–more in a “McDonald’s, Wendys, pepperoni pizza” kind of way. Nevertheless, he prefers his box of meat, I prefer my box of sex.

Her: You know, Frankin, your ideal girlfriend is probably a marriage-minded, monogamous lesbian.

This seems to have been a trend: many of the women in my life are women who wouldn’t appear, on first glance, to be well-suited to me. They’re monogamous by nature, or they’re lesbian by nature…

Lori is monogamous by nature. This is making our relationship very difficult, in no small measure because kellyv is not comfortable with the idea of me having a monogamous girlfriend. Lori, naturally, is not overjoyed at the prospect of sharing me, and I am not thrilled with the distance between us–I’ve never been good at long-distance relationships.

I’ve always been attracted to people who are different from me. Maybe it’s because I have more to learn from someone who’s different from me than from someone who’s just like me…or maybe it’s because I like surprises. I’ve also always thrived on chaos; defined roles in a relationship have never been important to me. Unfortunately, they are important to Lori, and to Kelly.

And yet, for all that, I still haven’t given up on the idea of finding a way to make this work for everyone. So does that make me determined, or foolish?

What does the Xero Magazine Web site, the site for the small-press literary magazine that lordfuckbeast and I publish, have in common with the National Organization for Women; the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University; the “Lloyd Doggett for Congress” Web site; A-1 Radiators of Seattle, Washington; the Holocaust Memorial Project; the Department of Astronomy at Smith Community College; The Odyssey, the ancient epic poem by Homer; the Info-Mall T-shirt shop; the British Conservative Party; the official Liza Minelli fan Web site; the Peaceable Texans for Firearms Rights; the Washington, DC Disability Guide organization; The Navarra, Spain chapter of the Red Cross; Keep America Beautiful; and the Jewish Teen Center of New York City?

Give up?

Yesterday:

Celebration with kellyv, lordfuckbeast, and scarlete. Why, you ask? Because Symphony is finally complete (and selling!), and we’ve received official notification that our patent is now in the works. Yes! It’s been a long, hard, expensive road to get this far.

My computer room has been turned into a miniature assembly plant for Symphonies.

Also yesterday:

Went and saw “8-Legged Freaks” with my friend K. Nobody else wanted to see it–too bad, too, because it was one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a very long time.

Go see it! No, really, I mean it. It’s highly entertaining. The bit with the cat (you’ll know it when you see it) is hysterical.

I do not like them, Sam I am.

Where to start? It’s been quite a successful week.

Well, they do say a picture’s worth a thousand words, so I’ll start there. Spent a good deal of time in the darkroom, printing and teaching some friends how to print:

Almost completely finished with my model plane; I just have to finish mounting the servos, pack the radio receiver, and run-in the engine. Going to try to go to my first Tampa model airplane club meeting a week from next Saturday.

Things with Lori are very very good–much better than anyone engaged in a relationship betwen an essentially monogamous person and an essentially polyamorous person has any right to expect.

kellyv still loves her new Matrix. It’s definitely far more practical than the sports cars we’re accustomed to, and she’s been happy as a clam. And we can carry people around without forcing them to ride with their knees in their nose.

And I’ve been thinking about green eggs and ham.

When the email appeared in my mailbox, you could’ve knocked me over with a feather, if you were of a mind to. I worked with her many years ago, though our friendship didn’t ever really seem to develop into its full potential; then she was gone, all the way across the country and working somewhere else. I would long since have thought she’d’ve forgotten all about me.

Before she left, I got her a copy of “Green Eggs and Ham,” the Dr. Seuss book. She’d never read it, even in spite of the fact that she’s far more literate than I am–an oversight I felt compelled to rectify.

Her: ‘I do not like that Sam I Am, I do not like that Sam I am.’ Hey!
Me: Don’t worry, it has a happy ending…

So now she’s doing very well for herself, and we’ve started talking again, which is cool.

These past twelve months will, I think, be remembered at the year of new relationships established and old friendships renewed. And that, I think, is awesome.

Yesterday, we went out to look at new cars, since kellyv‘s Eclipse was getting a bit long in the tooth. Needless to say, we came home with a new one:

It’s much more practical than her old Eclipse, and light-years ahead of my del Sol in practicality. Not that practicality is necessarily the best measure of a car, of course; but she kept saying things like “driving people around” and “long distance” and “carrying stuff” and who am i to disagree?

It was actually a cooperative effort between her and Lori. I was incolved only at the end, to sign the paperwork; she and Lori sat down on two different computers three thousand miles apart and coordinated a new-car search, so when we walked into the dealership she already knew exactly what she wanted and how many were on the lot. Gotta love technology; it makes taking money out of the consumer’s pocket so much more efficient.

It’s a cool car. Toyota is becoming the Apple of the car industry; from a user-interface point of view, the matrix is the most well-designed car I’ve ever seen. It’s also clearly aimed at the thirtysomething GenX crowd–it has a lot of gadgets with “Gee whiz” tech appeal. Which is, of course, very cool in my book.